Why does tomorrow feel farther away than it is?
“I’ll do it tomorrow” can feel like making an arrangement when you have only changed the name of the day on which the work is supposed to happen.
Today is particular. You know what has tired you, what still needs doing and how much evening remains. Tomorrow is easier to picture without those details. It seems to contain time that has not yet been claimed, including time for whatever you do not want to fit into today.
In Who am I going to be?, Innocent brings that imagined distance back to ordinary hours. Days acquire different names, but the time passes continuously. What we leave undone, choose to do or make possible now becomes part of the day that follows.
A Spark from Questions Asked
Tomorrow seems far away if you call it another day, but it really is just a few hours away.
Suppose a button has come loose on a shirt you like. You know how to sew it back on and have what you need. For several evenings, you have put the shirt aside for tomorrow. It is a minor task, and each delay has felt minor too.
The next evening arrives with dinner, tiredness and something else you would rather do. The task has not become harder. The imagined easy interval has simply turned into another ordinary evening. You make the same transfer again.
Seeing tomorrow more accurately does not mean you must mend the shirt tonight. You may need rest more than the shirt. But it changes what would count as a plan. If you mean to do it tomorrow, where in that actual day will it fit? What do you already expect to be doing then? You are choosing time within a life, not sending the task to a person who has no other demands.
You might decide to mend it before putting the sewing things away on a day when you already have them out. You might decide the shirt can wait until the weekend. Either choice is more definite than repeatedly relying on tomorrow to feel unlike today.
The chapter connects these small transfers with a larger question about who one is becoming. A future life is reached through days that can each appear too ordinary to matter. That does not make one postponed button a verdict on your character. It does invite attention to an arrangement you keep renewing without quite choosing it: the things you want remain waiting, while each day’s available time is spent elsewhere.
Rest can be one of the things you genuinely want and need. So can an unplanned conversation or an evening with no useful result to display. Treating time honestly includes those uses; it does not require making every hour productive.
What deserves questioning is the expectation that a differently named day will supply the decision for you. Tomorrow may bring more room, or less. If a task still matters, you can give it a place among the things that day is likely to contain. If it does not, you can reconsider it instead of keeping it permanently promised to the next day.
Related lessons
AI-generated from Innocent Mwatsikesimbe's writing.
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